Because Philippi was where St. Paul first carried the gospel into Europe, it has always held a special interest for western readers. That interest grows when we remember that the neighborhood was the scene of the last struggle for the old Roman republic—where the last obstacle was cleared away to the empire against which the Christian kingdom would one day try its strength. The sixteenth chapter of Acts deepens this and ties it directly to Paul’s life. Its incidents are not merely sentimental; they are memorable points in church history. The prayer by the riverside is the only direct reference to Jewish worship in the account, and it suggests thoughts different from the usual references to the synagogue. Nothing tells us whether Lydia was a Jew by birth or a convert, but the words “she worshipped God” likely settle that she was not a heathen. The girl with the spirit of divination is one of those instances found everywhere of magic and enchantment across the Empire and of the trade made of it. Paul’s grief at her seeming to endorse his teaching shows how naturally the apostolic teaching about the Spirit stood out as the distinctly Christian teaching, how quickly the counterfeit claimed kinship with it, and how strongly Paul felt his main duty was to set the one against the other. Then the Roman magistrates interfere—not from dislike of the teaching itself, but from the Roman habit of indulging their subjects’ superstitions and protecting so recognized a business as the diviner’s. Still the complaint takes a Roman form: the city’s customs were invaded, and the colonists who claimed Roman privileges would not tolerate the meddling of Jews. The prison and the earthquake will only be explained away by those who think the Church’s growth was not supernatural, and that a sign of God’s presence with truth-tellers is a break in God’s order rather than a confirmation of it. How that outward event woke the jailor’s conscience, how the thought of deliverance first dawned on him, how the Apostles at once spoke to him of the Lord and Deliverer of his conscience—we have known since childhood, yet the words are far from exhausted and should be studied again with the whole apostolic message. Nor should we forget Paul’s insistence on his rights as a Roman citizen and his resolve to assert the law against those who administered it wrongly. His reverence for Roman law as part of God’s order in the world is everywhere plain, and we misunderstand him and his work if we ignore it.
Important as these events are, they are not as clearly linked to this Epistle as Paul’s experiences in Ephesus are to the letter to that church. It seems the Philippians were shaken more by his imprisonment and likely death than by anything in their own region. His trials would have raised thoughts that could unsettle even Christians longer established than they were. Their shepherd was struck down and in the Emperor’s hands—yet it was his own countrymen who had driven him to Rome. He seemed silenced by God’s own decree. Many Jewish members of the Church denounced him, denied he was a true preacher of Christ, and claimed he taught a different doctrine from the older Apostles. Such words reached the room where the soldier guarded him, and were heard in every church he had founded, and surely repeated by the Judaizers in Macedonia. We know a little of how such hints work on quiet minds, and what turmoil and unbelief they breed. Imagine them reaching converts already suffering from Jewish and Gentile enemies, who had among them—strange as it seems to those who assume the persecuted early Church must have been pure—careless and inconsistent members; and we have most of the circumstances Paul addresses in this letter.
Disunion threatened the Philippians as it did the Corinthians, but here it seems to have sprung less from intellectual causes and factiousness than from despondency. The whole letter seems aimed against that. It is a constant call to trust, hope, and joy—which troubles need not dampen and may even serve. It is plainly a leading principle with the Apostle, appearing in every letter, that trust and hope and joy are not solitary feelings: they belong to a community, are nourished by mutual exchange, sustained by a common Spirit, and are meaningless unless they point to a common object. The strongly thankful tone that runs through this whole epistle is always tied to calls for fellowship, oneness of spirit and soul, shared work, shared sympathy. These are not mere exhortations to do right and avoid wrong; they rest on the fact that the Philippians are joined to each other and to the Apostle himself, however far away, by a bond nothing can break—one he can realize in his prayers and thanks while imprisoned at Rome as fully as if he were with them. What better thing can he give thanks for than that they share this fellowship with him? What better can he ask for them than that they grasp its full meaning? Every other blessing is contained in it: clearness of mind, freedom from offence given or taken, walking in Christ’s light, and the hope of his perfect day.
Why should his imprisonment discourage them? It has made his gospel known in the very palace of the Cæsars. Why should the different opinions about him discourage them? Christ’s name was heard even from those who most disliked the imprisoned servant and would gladly have added to his suffering. Was that not cause for joy, to him and to them? Why be cast down that his death might be near? To live on in the flesh was to draw life from Christ; to die was to gain a fuller, richer life. He could not tell which was better, but he did not doubt he would be granted what was most useful to them. He had little doubt he would see them again face to face.
But suppose he did not? Then let them live as fellow-heirs of the inheritance the Gospel proclaims; let them stand fast in one spirit and strive with one soul for the faith of the Gospel, unshaken by their adversaries. Their peace—all the sweeter and more honorable because they were allowed not only to believe in Christ but to suffer for Him—would witness the deliverance God had worked in them, and stand in contrast with those who can never be at peace, who can only cast up mire and dirt. So they would be one with the Apostle, near or far, in the same battle he was fighting. But where was this unity to come from? How could men of so many temperaments and interests truly have the one mind he demanded? That one mind was given them. They were members of Christ—of Him who, being in the form of God, did not grasp at equality with God, but emptied Himself and made Himself of no reputation, took the form of a servant, was made in the likeness of men, and humbled Himself further, obedient unto death, even death on the cross. And it was this humbled, crucified Man whom God highly exalted, whose name is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and earth and below, and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ, to the glory of God the Father.
Here is the central doctrine of this Epistle, as of all the others, cast in the form best suited to their need. It is the same truth of the humble Jesus and the exalted Christ—of the Son who is one with the Father and makes Himself so one with man that His mind is shown to be the very mind belonging to man. It is the only mind that can make us humble, keep us at one, and make us share the glory of Him who created us to know Him and be like Him. On this Paul rests all that follows. He asks for obedience that does not depend on his presence. He asks them to work out their salvation—salvation from the strifes and divisions keeping them from Christ and each other—with the fear and trembling of men who know God Himself is working in them both the will and the action for His good pleasure. On this ground he can tell them to do everything without grumbling or arguing, to be blameless children of God in a crooked and twisted generation, shining as lights in the world, holding out the word of life to those most sunk in death—so proving the Apostle had not labored in vain, but had sent out men who could carry the torch when he could run no longer. Even if he were poured out as an offering for their sakes, he could rejoice with them. Why should they not rejoice with him?
Here, as everywhere, the personal blends with the general and universal. His deep sense of spiritual fellowship with the Philippians does not make him forget their shared friends, Timothy and Epaphroditus, through whom he had reached them and who felt and suffered for them as he did. It hardly needs saying—every epistle shows it—that all personal griefs, sicknesses, and losses of estate or reputation mingle with the Apostle’s loftiest discourse without lowering it in the least. Here they fit perfectly, displaying the mind of Him who suffered with each and is exalted to be Lord of all.
But his sorrow over his sick friend gives way at once to the whole letter’s refrain: “Rejoice in the Lord.” He has said it often; he must say it again. For there are dogs, evil-workers, counterfeit champions of circumcision, hindering them from this joy. True circumcision meant cutting off the flesh so the spirit could rise, renewed to life, freedom, and joy in Christ. Paul had as many fleshly privileges as anyone—all the outward marks that set him apart and gave him grounds to boast of his national election. But he counted them loss and rubbish for Christ’s sake. For the righteousness that is in Christ, that comes through faith, that is God’s own, he had thrown away all the righteousness that is mere conformity to the law. He longed to know Christ Himself, the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of His sufferings. He was being shaped into the image of Christ’s death and longed to reach the image of the resurrection. He had not attained it; he was always pressing after it, forgetting what lay behind and reaching upward, wanting to lose himself, to be found in Christ, to reach the mark of God’s high calling in Christ. This was the highest goal even the most perfect could set himself—yet it was the common goal for the whole Church. All might have this mind; and any who thought otherwise might trust God to reveal it to them.
He had told them what he strove for; let them strive for the same. Let them consider what he and those most in sympathy with him were aiming at. He knew, sadly, that others had other aims—low, grovelling, earthly aims—and would surely attain what they sought: the ruin of their moral being. But let the Philippians remember that their citizenship is in heaven, where Christ the Deliverer is; that instead of bowing our spirits to our bodies, we wait for Him to transform the body of our humiliation into the likeness of His glorious body, by the power with which He can subdue all things to Himself.
Again and again the Apostle turns to particular cases, gently touching on troubles, jealousies, or divisions he had heard of, and bringing the principle he has been unfolding to bear on them. But since the letter’s great aim is encouragement and the lifting of despondency, he seizes the chance to tell the Philippians how much delight they had given him by the tokens of love they had repeatedly sent—gifts precious to him because he was sure they were precious to God. He shows them how everything kind, gentle, venerable, and lovely, whether shown imperfectly in weak human beings or fully in the acts of God, was dear to him and the food of his spirit. He would have them dwell on such things. Then the letter’s chief exhortation would be fulfilled: they would rejoice in the Lord. And the blessed effect of that inward joy would appear to all in their evenness and moderation. They would feel the Lord near them, be free of anxious cares, and in prayer and supplication—never apart from thanksgiving—make their requests known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all our reason, would guard their hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus.
Epistle to the Colossians
The Acts of the Apostles tell us nothing about the state of the Church at Colosse. Since Paul says he had never seen the Christians there or at Laodicea, Luke was unlikely to mention them. Everything we know must come from the Epistle itself. It raises a question much discussed lately, connected with Bauer’s theory about the Pauline epistles.
Our countryman Hammond found Gnosticism everywhere in the Church’s first age and supposed the apostolic letters were written mainly to expose its dangers. Modern schools, by contrast, deny that any trace of Gnosticism exists before the second century, and so dispute the genuineness of the epistles that seem to allude to it. The other option is to explain such allusions away as one commentator’s fancy — often an easy course, and Hammond certainly strained many passages to fit his theory. But the Epistle to the Colossians contains hints that cannot be got rid of. Anyone familiar with second-century Gnosticism would almost inevitably conclude that Paul is pointing at some of its doctrines and habits. And these allusions did not slip in by accident; they are part of the very substance of the letter. Remove them and its purpose becomes barely intelligible.
But does admitting this mean the writer knew the Valentinians or Carpocratians, or alludes even slightly to the developed forms Gnostic doctrine took when men deliberately tried to combine the Gospel with the teaching of the Magians or the Alexandrian sages? I do not think any such allusion can be detected. Read simply, the letter suggests this: no great schemes about divine emanations have yet been directly blended with the apostles’ teaching, though the possibility of all such schemes is plainly there — the seeds of a hundred heresies have been sown, and their growth is beginning to show above ground.
If we grant this — and I only ask the reader to grant it if the Epistle’s own evidence supports it — we can do justice to Hammond and to Bauer, and also to another class, like our Bishop Davenant, who found in this Epistle a refutation of various Romish errors. Those who apply the Apostle’s teaching to his own times are, I think, the safer guides, though the drier. Yet the others have a freshness and vitality that seems to prove them right even where history says they are wrong. We only distrust them when they tie Scripture to one case and stop us applying it to other cases we care about more today. By taking the Epistle to mean what it says — not reading later information into it, yet using our experience to judge what tendencies are likely to appear in people and societies under similar conditions — we may find in the Church at Colosse ways of thinking and acting that help us understand the Church of the second century and of the middle ages, and that may bear even more remarkably on our own time than on either. Above all, we shall be convinced that the Epistle is thoroughly genuine and Pauline, in perfect harmony with the others we have studied, carrying those distinct local marks we have never found absent from any apostolic letter — marks whose absence would oblige us to reject it almost as much as a flat contradiction of the rest of the New Testament would.
A forger would have to be very skilful to throw into his imitation of Paul not merely his turns of phrase, his openings, and his personal allusions, but the very mind and heart of the Apostle — his passionate vehemence, the tangled sentences that come from the multitude of his thoughts, together with an order that shows itself not in spite of the tangle but through it. His skill is the more remarkable because he does not copy the outside of Paul’s mind. He introduces no phrases about justification, by which systematizers would have identified Paul and satisfied themselves the document was his. Instead he seizes at once, with an intuition rare in a dishonest man or a forger, the very principle we have found characteristic of the Apostle in every letter — the one he states in Galatians as the explanation of his conversion and his mission to the Gentiles: that it pleased God to reveal His Son in him, that he might preach Him among the Gentiles. Those words have been the keynote of the other epistles, and they give sense and unity to this one more than to any other.
The passages down to the fourteenth verse of the first chapter recall the Epistle to the Ephesians. The tone is so alike that a careless reader might think he was only hearing the Ephesian lessons repeated. But read again, and its omissions show a different aim. There are the same thanksgivings to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for the young Church’s faith and love and hope laid up in heaven; the same acknowledgment of the fruitful, life-giving power in the word of the Gospel’s truth; the same prayer that they be filled with the knowledge of God’s will, bear the fruit of good works, grow in the knowledge of God, have inward strength for endurance, and give thanks to the Father who called them and fitted them for the inheritance of the saints in light, delivered them from the power of darkness and moved them into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom they have redemption and forgiveness of sins. But what made Ephesians distinctive — its start from the blessings God gave them in Christ before the world’s foundation — is absent here. Since that beginning set the tone of the whole Ephesian letter, we would blunder badly to confuse the two just because some thoughts belonged to both Churches alike.
The passage that follows brings us, I think, to the very heart and subject of the Epistle: Christ is the image of the unseen God, first-born of all creation; in Him all things were created, in the heavens and on earth, seen and unseen — thrones, lordships, principalities, powers; all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all, and all things hold together in Him. He is the head of the body, the beginning, first-begotten from the dead, that He might be first in all things. For in Him all the fulness was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things, making peace by the blood of His cross. And you, once alienated and enemies in mind through evil works, He has now reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and blameless — if you remain grounded and settled in the faith, not moved from the hope of the Gospel you have heard, which has been preached in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become the minister.
This passage arises naturally out of what precedes; there is no break in the sense, and its opening clause belongs to the earlier sentence. Follow the language and you see everything moving toward this declaration of Christ as the image of God, the ground and pattern of the visible and invisible creation, Head of all powers in the unseen world, pattern in death as in life, beginning of the old creation and the new, and Head of the Church — its Head because the whole Divine fulness was gathered up in Him, and because He has actually re-united the torn fragments of humanity in Himself, enabling particular men, such as the Colossians who had been cut off from God by their own evil, to take their proper place again in God’s order.
But why does he dwell so on the unseen God, and on things seen and unseen? Why heap up phrases for spiritual or angelic powers? Why so laboriously tie earth to heaven, the local Colossian Church to the divine order that includes far more than the cosmos of physical science? Because in this Church questions had arisen about the relation of the seen to the unseen — doubts whether the invisible God might not reveal Himself through many subordinate agencies, whether there was any one Person to whom all were subject, in whom God was fully revealed, in whom man could meet Him, in whom the different orders of creation and cycles of history found their common end. Paul’s very Gospel was that such a person, such a centre and reconciler, had been revealed. The most natural doubt was whether this could be true; the most sweeping denial was to say it false. All idolatry, so far as it asserts many centres rather than one divine-and-human centre, was fighting this belief, each form resisting the Gospel by keeping one set of men apart from others. Judaism too, when it made itself an exclusive religion, warred against Paul’s claim, standing on merely national ground while he held that the Jew was called to bless all the families of earth. And it was certain that as the tendencies of Heathenism and Judaism reappeared inside the Christian Church, this common denial would reappear too. What forms it would take, a wise man could guess but not predict. He would be nearly sure the old idolatries would return in a more spiritualized dress — coarse sensual forms turned into abstract essences, a crowd of half-gods and secondary principles set between creature and Creator; that Jews and Gentiles would each help frame a new demonology mixing the material and spiritual; that heathen mythology and philosophy would prevail in the Churches of the lands they had shaped. But the teacher of the first age need not directly meddle with these later combinations. He served the world better by pointing to the root of these tendencies, the way they would try to remake the new revelation in their own likeness — and above all the one cure for them.
That cure lies first in the full declaration of Christ as the one centre of humanity and the one manifestation of God, a Gospel proved not by argument but by itself, as it met and reconciled the partial theories set against it and the human intuitions to which each of those theories answered. Secondly, it lay in applying this Gospel to the particular inferences the teachers and disciples had drawn from those theories, and the practices built on them — showing that Christ accomplished what they were clumsily and unsatisfactorily attempting.
One first inference, from believing that Christ had disclosed great mysteries of the unseen world without the full belief about His person and reconciliation that Paul urged, was that they had something to do to complete what He had left undone. He had suffered for the world; they too must suffer to attain the spiritual kingdom He had prepared. We need not trace the confusions this opinion has caused in every age of the Church. But was there no truth in it needing to be freed from its dangerous additions? Had not Paul said we must enter the kingdom through much tribulation? What did his own sufferings mean? He meets it at once: “I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and I am filling up that which was lacking in the tribulations of Christ in my flesh for His body, which is the Church.” This is bold language, easily quoted to support great superstitions and to deny Christ’s finished sacrifice. But since the whole aim of the letter is to declare Christ’s completeness against those who set Him aside and bring in acts of their own to reach heights He had not brought them to, we may assume these words too correct that error. And they do so most practically. Even if “the sufferings of Christ” meant His sufferings on the cross — which does not seem to me the simplest sense — the phrase “for His body’s sake, which is the Church” at once destroys the idea that he suffered to win higher rewards for himself. He could only mean that he was entering into his Master’s suffering: as Christ gave Himself for the Church to make it pure, so Paul was allowed to suffer in his small measure in the same spirit and for the same end — the very opposite of supplying deficiencies in Christ’s work. But if we read “the sufferings of the Christ in my flesh,” we get a sense more in keeping with the whole passage, free of that misconstruction, still honoring the truth hidden in the Colossians’ error, and confounding that error even more. He does not even claim the sufferings as his own; they are the sufferings of Christ in him — the pain Christ still feels in His servant, as He felt it on earth, from the world’s strife and from the struggle against the powers of evil in which He and all His disciples share. And this conflict of Christ within him was for the sake of His Body the Church, of which Paul was made a minister, to fulfil the word of God — the mystery hidden from the ages but now made manifest to His saints, to whom God chose to make known the riches of its glory among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory; whom he proclaims, warning every man and teaching every man, that he may present every man perfect in Christ; for which end he labors, striving by the energy that works mightily in him.
This passage confirms my reading of the other, though that is a small part of its value. Nearly every word points at some habit of mind the Colossians were prone to — yet without rudely attacking it, indeed while giving it a right direction. Their teachers must have spoken much of an unfathomable abyss or mystery, a divine fulness out of which partial illuminations flowed, and of a perfectness or full initiation belonging to men who had purified themselves above the sensual crowd and the childish wisdom of beginners. Each of these thoughts, pregnant as it is with Pantheism, vagueness, and self-glorification, the Apostle takes up and redeems. There is a mystery hidden from ages and generations — but now made manifest, and he is sent to declare it fully. He is to counsel and teach every man, to present every man perfect and fully initiated in Christ. How can the wise and the foolish be so levelled? Because the mystery he has found in himself and declares to them is “Christ in them, the hope of glory.” As it was Christ in Paul who suffered and strove for the Church, his whole aim was to make each Gentile, each man, know that the same Christ who is in his brother is in him — and so not to exalt himself above his brother, nor dream of mystical flights to scale heaven, but in toil, suffering, and teaching to enter into the loving mind of his Lord.
In the next paragraph, opening the second chapter, other expressions occur that more obviously, though not more really, belong to the Gnostic temper. Spiritual understanding, wisdom, knowledge, insight into mysteries — these the Colossians had learned to prize above all, and each teacher counted himself great as he could claim them, speaking of them as rewards of mortifying the flesh. The initiated man might hope to converse with angels and be admitted to the most secret divine treasures. The philosophized Jewish Christian, fresh from Alexandria, would boast of his advantage: his circumcision was the appointed means of raising him out of his fleshly nature into spiritual apprehension. He would tell the Gentile that baptism might serve as a purification from outward defilement and an entry to the lower heights of knowledge. Likely there were Gentile teachers too who held baptism the beginning of a system of purification by which they might attain a vision as clear as any son of Abraham’s. No doubt the one dwelt on Christ’s circumcision, the other on His baptism, giving both a mystical meaning, treating them as crises in His life when the divine more fully mingled with the human, or the spiritual displaced the earthly.
Read the next chapter with even these rough hints in mind, and we better understand why Paul stresses his prayer that their hearts be comforted, knit together in love, into the full riches of assured understanding — thus hinting that only by working together as members of one body in the power of love could they gain the intellectual gifts they used as excuses for self-exaltation. We see why he wants for them the acknowledgment of the mystery of the Christ of God, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden — the treasures they fancied they could seize by their high thoughts. As usual, he speaks of the intruders only after speaking of the Church’s order and constitution in Christ, which he can rejoice in though he has never seen them with his eyes. He does not wish to make them something other than they are, but to have them rooted and built up in Christ, strengthened in faith, abounding in thanksgiving for the inheritance they had entered. Plausible men with plausible speeches were bidding them seek, as if far off, a blessing already brought near, a state they already lived in. They were told that certain speculations, or human traditions, or outward rites, might gradually bring them into the fulness of the Godhead. But all that fulness dwells bodily in Christ, and they had it in Him; they were partakers of His circumcision, made without hands; they had put off the body of the flesh in Him, been buried with Him in baptism, and raised with Him through faith in the energy of God who raised Him from the dead. So the completeness of Christ’s revelation and work, and the complete redemption of their society in Him, became the apostolic witness against the Gnostic tendency and its outward machinery. God had already brought them into the state they were trying to climb into. The knowledge they wanted was the knowledge of that state. They had Christ’s circumcision — let them claim their deliverance from fleshly lusts; they had His baptism into death and resurrection — let them live as men dead and risen with Him.
“For,” he continues, you being dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, forgiving all our transgressions, wiping out the handwriting of decrees that was against us and contrary to us, taking it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. This language is not new; it has come up in every epistle. But here it applies peculiarly. The failure to believe their transgressions pardoned, the notion that they were still under institutions meant to effect the pardon rather than witness that they had received it, was a constant excuse for Gnostic speculation and asceticism. To say that Christ had nailed both those decrees and their sins to His cross, that in that cross God and man were satisfactorily reconciled, struck the new teaching at the root and killed it. Still he had to go into particulars so they could see how his doctrine met their case. When he says Christ spoiled the principalities and powers, displaying them openly and triumphing over them, we are brought into the heart of their longing after intermediate powers and agencies — another symptom of this Church’s disease. What need of such longing if the Lord who took their flesh was above all these and had proved His mastery of them? But with that longing came minute, wearisome rules about food and drink, feasts, new moons, and sabbaths — all an excuse for harsh judgments and for the tyranny of particular teachers. With it came a mock humility, the worship of demons and angels, a pompous contempt of visible things, and an inflation supposed spiritual but really springing from the mind of the flesh. Let them see that the shadows had passed and the substance had come. Let them not look up to angels but hold to the Head of angels, in whom the whole body is knit together by joints and bands and supplied with nourishment for a perpetual divine growth. They were dead with Christ to the elements of the world; why then live by its rules, laying down prohibitions about touching, tasting, handling? Such things belong to the perishable, to human commands. They have an appearance of wisdom — will-worship, mock-humility, contempt of the body all look like promising means to higher ends — but they have no real worth, spring from the flesh, and do not even satisfy the flesh.
In the following chapter Paul still keeps the manner, and partly the phrasing, of those he warns against. The new teachers would have urged them to raise their minds to things above, not to dwell on things of earth, and to put to death their members set on earthly things — their fleshly appetites. Paul honestly takes up their phrases and turns them to another use, drawing out their true living sense, showing that their aim could not be reached by their means, and that a far higher result could be reached by the faith they denied. They were to seek things above because they had been raised with Christ, who sits at God’s right hand; to think of things above, not of earth, because they were dead and their life was hidden with Christ in God, and when Christ their life appeared they would appear with Him in glory. But the members they were to kill were not their bodies but the things destroying body and spirit alike — fornication, uncleanness, base passion, evil desire, and the covetousness that is idolatry, for which, as he told the Ephesians, God’s wrath comes on the children of disobedience, and in which they once walked. Now they had put off these, and anger, malice, slander, and foul speech. See how far Paul rises above the Gnostic doctors in what he thinks redeemed men may attain — not glimpses of a spiritual world or converse with aeons and archangels, but the very knowledge and nature of God Himself. And see how far below them he dives in naming the vices men are freed from, striking at the root while they played on the surface. Yet he is the plain practical man, they the speculators. He leads his disciples to common homely morality, which the others usually despised and rarely reached. He uses blunt words — “Do not lie one to another” — knowing well that Christians then, as always, are apt to lie, and that high notions of their own spirituality are no protection. The protection is what he has urged throughout: having stripped off the old man with his deeds and put on the new man, renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator, where there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.
I know of no nobler passage in all Paul’s epistles, none showing more clearly how the plainest law of individual morality is bound up with the great principle of human brotherhood, and how that rests on the divine and glorified humanity of Christ. Nor does any passage, with the one following it, show more plainly how we must claim our rights as regenerate men in order to rise continually to newness of life. They had put on the new man; therefore put on, as God’s elect, holy and beloved, mercies, gentleness, humility — the very humility the Gnostic teachers mimicked with their humble airs — moderation, long-suffering, forbearing and forgiving one another, as the Lord forgave you; and above all this clothing, that love which is the bond of perfection. That last word shows how well Paul remembers his purpose even when most carried away. The Gnostic problem was how to make a perfect, initiated man above all others; Paul solves it by saying that the love which makes you submit to all others and binds you to all others is the secret of perfection.
On this foundation he builds, as in Ephesians, the whole structure of social life that the Gnostics ignored. But first he treats the spiritual life they did prize, and for which they had so many rules. Paul has few, but very comprehensive: you were called in one body into the peace of Christ, so let it rule your hearts; be thankful; let Christ’s word dwell in you richly; teach and exhort one another; sing in your hearts to God; and whatever you do, do all in Christ’s name, thanking God the Father through Him. Instead of the self-exalting life, the life of men yielding to a blessed power of good that seeks to bless them. Instead of the individual life, the life of mutual instruction and encouragement. Instead of the ambitious life of the would-be sage or saint, the musical life of the churchman who feels himself one of a family and does nothing but in the Name of its Head.
And then come the plain outward family duties — obstacles to spiritual contemplation in the Gnostic’s judgment, precious elements of the unselfish spiritual kingdom in Paul’s. They are much the same as in Ephesians, but here serve a different purpose. Like his request for prayer that God would open a door for him to speak the mystery of Christ, like the greetings from and to friends, like the greeting in his own hand and the plea to remember his bonds, they all testify that the highest and most divine faith is the least abstract — the most human, homely, and personal.